There has been a proliferation of business and technical information from an ever increasing number of sources. Businesses have a vested interest in making this information available to their employees and their customers. Few have been able to do so, however because it is difficult to provide the desired information without requiring excessive effort by the recipient or overwhelming the recipient with extraneous information.
Part of the problem is caused by the way literature searches are performed in present day text searching systems and current awareness systems. Most text searching systems are based on searching for particular words. These systems are difficult to formulate a precise search query because of the number of ways the searched for information may be expressed in the searched text base, and the multiple different meanings that can be applied to a word in the articles of that text base. If the search query is too precise, much of the desired information may be missed. If it is too broad, the amount of hits may be overwhelming. For instance, the use of the two word query of "drug trials", in attempting to learn about emerging products in the pharmaceutical industry, would obtain search results that would include drug related criminal litigation and leave out pertinent reference where "drug testing" is used in text in place of "drug trials".
Known current awareness systems are easier to use than text search systems because they filter news and other information into defined categories. However, results with most such systems are limited to what falls into the search. If the literature search is for something that has no defined category, these systems are useless. Awareness systems that allow the use of custom queries can be as difficult to use as text search systems.
Another problem with both present day text search and awareness systems, is that they typically present results as a list of document titles, sometimes in chronological order and at other times by relevance. These facilities do not present the wealth of information found in searching in any organized way. Each document turned up by the search must be examined individually and read to see if it is truly pertinent. No source is treated as more important than or distinct from any other source. In other words, the appearance of the information on the screen is not organized for easy consumption.
In the past, information on related subject matter has been arranged in "books" to provide organization to the provided data. What has been proposed lacks sufficient control by the user over the content and appearance of the supplied information. In other words, the user is given prepackaged search results categorized as selected by the supplier of the book, and not the results of an independent search on a subject selected by the user.